There are 21 million slaves TODAY.

[Renew Deal]

I'm sure people feel good about themselves attacking innocent people with slavery accusations, but I think it trivializes the fact that there are currently approx. 21 million slaves in the world.

Slavery experts believe there is nowhere in the world where people are legally shackled, beaten and sold as if they were property, but the ILO's report "2012 Global estimate of forced labour" estimates that 20.9 million people are victims of forced labour.

Its definition of this is "work or service which is exacted from any person under the threat of a penalty and for which the person has not offered himself or herself voluntarily".

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26513804

And from those, many of them are in countries that are our closest friends and trading partners:

Top 10 countries
India - 14m
China - 3m
Pakistan - 2.1m
Nigeria - 0.7m
Ethiopia - 0.65m
Russia - 0.51m
Thailand - 0.47m
DR Congo - 0.46m
Myanmar - 0.38m
Bangladesh - 0.34m

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26513804

And this doesn't include the country of North Korea which is a slave state of 24+ million people.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/29/world/asia/north-korea-fast-facts

So cut the bullshit accusations and work to expose suffering in today's world.

[Kalidurga]

1. I don't want to trivialize this brutality

Because no doubt many modern slaves die from being enslaved and those that survive have been brutalized in ways most people can't imagine.

But, there are other forms of slavery that go unnoticed, modern wage slaves. It might not be quite as brutal or dramatic, but people that fail within the system can end up homeless (and die), end up sick (and die for lack of medical care), become imprisoned (for various laws passed against being homeless or poor), and because they are poor and voiceless (I am in this group even though technically I do have a place to live), they are blamed for all the evils in society including the recession.

We need to address both problems because well really both problems are created by the same system and both problems aren't really all that separate.

[Igel]

4. The problem is the change in definition.

Wage slaves.

Well, that's pretty much everybody. And always has been. If not slaves to wages, then to something else.

The difference in extent and kinds of freedom. As a "wage slave" I have a lot of freedoms that some, at various points, thought worthy to die for. In any event, I can pick up and move. Nobody owns me (unless we want to say, as some do, that it's the government--who allows me to have some of my earnings and some of my liberties, but both are revocable).

To be sure I'm still not in control of many things. That just means I don't have unbounded freedom and liberty. Who does? Even the wealthiest is at the mercy of banks and depressions, tornadoes and cancer. Farmers, free of wages, depend on weather and commodity prices. Politicians are slaves to voters and donors and "friends". Do things wrong, suffer from bad weather, and you're sick, homeless, and possibly in jail. Even hunter-gatherers were at the mercy of the elements. Of course, with no clear means to keep slaves and no clear benefit from owning slaves, hunter-gatherers missed the rich metaphorical manipulation that can go with the concept of slavery.

That's a far cry from most things usually called slavery, which is why the metaphor shouldn't be confused with the prototype referent. If under chattel slavery, my time and person aren't my own. I have no say over where I live or who I marry. None. Under some systems I might have some rights and liberties, but those systems typically degenerated into chattel slavery.

Same for the limited slavery called "serfdom," where I might be considered an improvement on the land. Buy the land, you buy me and my family--and our labor and skills. Perhaps I'm only obligated to give 2 days a week in labor, but that typically broadened over time as that system broke down.

[BubbaFett]

5. debt peonage

[daredtowork]

2. I was wondering today

Is the manipulation of the exchange rate used to appropriate labor? If I pay an undocumented laborer an under-the-table rate of $6/hr that remits to a greater exchange rate to their own home country, am I not, in essence, getting some "free" labor just because of the exchange rate? At the same time, even though the person is receiving a fortune in their own currency, they would be looked down upon because of their poverty here - so the exchange rate reinforces class hierarchies.

Sorry if this is a little off topic - I just associate receiving/controlling cost-free labor with slavery, and it seems like currency manipulation enables that.

[Agony]

3. Yup

much closer
http://graphics.latimes.com/product-of-mexico-labor/
and not so long ago
Coalition of Immokalee Workers
http://ciw-online.org/slavery/
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/business/in-florida-tomato-fields-a-penny-buys-progress.html?_r=0

[NewDeal_Dem]

6. There's no bullshit; pointing out that 'the best people' got rich off slavery and also get rich off

modern slavery and suffering is reinforcing the message.

The same type of people who profited from slavery profit from the misery of others today as well.

[Initech]

7. And why is American prison labor not counted as slave labor?

[gladium et scutum]

8. The Constitution

The XIII Amendment Section 1.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction